Securing RSS Feeds

[Streakfury]

Afternoon all,

I've just been playing around with RSS 2.0 feeds, and all is fine and dandy. The thing is, I want to use an RSS feed to feed articles from a website that is protected with a login system.

The RSS feed itself obviously lists articles contained within the site, and each one links to the login page rather than the page with the article itself. But I'd like to change it so that each feed links directly to the article, but users can't access the article unless they are logged in. If they're not logged in, I want them to be able to login, and then automatically be redirected to the article.

It'll basically be a normal RSS feed, but one which checks if a user is logged in before taking them to the article, and allowing them to login if they haven't done so already.

Any ideas?

- Streakfury

[Streakfury]

Also, I'm using XML to store some articles and things, and I wondered if there is any way in which I can link the data in my other XML files to the RSS feed, rather than having two separate XML files with the same data in - one for the data and another one for the RSS feed? As it stands I've basically got the same data stored twice.

I guess I'd like to be able to take some of the data in one XML file and use that as the 'description' in my RSS feed, for example.